So its better to use money that they control, take a chunk of, track, have the ability to freeze or seize at any time, and have the ability to print its value into oblivion essentially taxing anyone who saves or has any balance of it? Instead of using an anonymous, decentralized, non-reversible, that has fixed total number of coins, with no middle man, virtually no fees, impossible to block transactions, and global.

Bitcoin will do more to give power back to the people in the next 10 years, than anarchism as a whole has done in the last 50 years.

I used to be all gung ho for anarchism, but after looking around at what changes the world the most and improve the life of the most people the fastest is with technology. Unfortunately the only way to produce technology that is of any use you need to operate within capitalism.

What will do more damage a billionaire actively working to destroy capitalism as we know it or a black blocer kicking in some windows. The best way to kill capitalism is with capitalism, just because you operate within capitalism doesn’t mean you have to be evil. Do it better and be the change you want to see in the world. Most people aren’t as fearless as anarchists. They see you as trying to tear down the only system they have ever know without being able to point anywhere and say “look these guys are doing it and it works”. You have to build something and show people that it’s possible and that it is something they want.

Thank you for an excellent and intelligent reply. I believe the greediest of people will always find a way to take from others. A strict accounting system of energy in /energy out would alleviate most of the injustices in this world. Those who labor so hard deserve the most. With that system equality happens very quickly. I would like to say that true anarchy does not have to be about quick fixes or violence but personal responsibility to the self and others without authoritarianism. There are always rules established by the group. It is the failure of the group members to participate in all decisions that is the cause of failure. The capitalist approach to which you espouse is a part and parcel of anarchy. Eliminating the top man greedy empire builders is the necessity. It is imperialism and colonialist thought patterns along with unbridled greed and force that are the problems we must resolve.

Before I found out about Bitcoin I actually drew up plans and a model of an economy that only used energy as currency(literally KWH). I found that it would only kinda work, the problem is that it is really hard to figure out how much of the power people generate was actually being consumed and how much was lost in transmission, then when you add battery storage to the mix it makes things even more complicated.

I would say that bitcoin is a much more elegant and resilient of a system than anything based on energy production and consumption which is very hard to keep from being gamed or cheated.

Oh shit! You write such “excellent and intelligent reply”s… You compared bitcoins to “real money” and to anarchism. Why? I compared it with tacos!

Money is shit. Bitcoin wants to be money. So bitcoin is shit.

“Bitcoin will do more to give power back to the people in the next 10 years, than anarchism as a whole has done in the last 50 years.” you said. Power to whom? To the people with money! How can a homeless man, starving in the streets, get some bitcoins to survive one more day? On the other hand, those bastards spending lots of money on tenths of GPUs to build bitcoin mining supercomputers will get all the damn bitcoins!

And how’s bitcoin decentralized when most of the people use centralized wallet systems that are just like “bitcoin banks”?

Tacos > bitcoin. That’s the secret hidden in all the holy books. You can eat a taco, you can share a taco, you can give the taco back to mother earth. You can’t do that with a bitcoin. Bitcoins are virtual shit generated from nonsense.

Fuck bitcoin and the restructuring of the capitalist infrastructure, you are probably one of those “anarcho” capitalists who takes the side of the bosses over that of the exploited you are not of the anarchist tradition in any way shape or form

Let me get this straight you are saying we shouldn’t use a distributed, global, deflationary, with near zero transaction cost(which goes directly to the workers that help secure that transaction) and anonymous currency, because it might make capitalism look a little better? So instead we should keep using a banking and monetary system that has wreaked havoc on untold millions of lives, and is still being used as method of control on a global scale. That is,quite frankly, fucking insane. Anyone who would prefer supporting government currencies over Bitcoin is siding with the fascists. Please explain to me how supporting and using Bitcoin is worse than supporting the existing power structures.

Using Bitcoins takes power away from governments and banks because money has been their main method for control of the world for the last 50 years. Bitcoin is at least decentralized and open source making the banking elite and Governments powerless to stop or coerce. I’m sure you are familiar with Mayer Rothschild’s famous quote “Let me issue and control a Nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.” Bitcoin gives that power to the people of the world, anyone can participate and be their own bank, no one has to ask permission from their government overlords before they make a transaction. This is the biggest power grab(taking the power back) opportunity for the people of the world in all of history. Bitcoin is progress, it’s better than anything we have, while I don’t purport it to be perfect I will say that is more perfect than any other monetary/transaction system right now. Since it is open source it can always be evolved into the perfect currency or even branched off to your own anarcho currency of whatever design you choose. Cryptocurrencies are here to stay no matter what any government or institution says or does.

As an aside, and I know this is cliche, but everyone should keep an open mind to new ideas. I think anarchists sometimes get too distracted on the particulars of the means but instead focus on achieving the end(reducing human suffering and allowing people to be fulfilled in their lives), anyway possible.

Bitcoin only looks like its taking power from corporations and governments the reality is that the capitalist system is a constantly evolving system of oppression which restructures itself like it did in the 70′s and 80′s

I don’t see how you think that this is only looks like it is taking power away from corps & gov.

The world runs on capitalism and people find that money is a useful tool for trade and will always exist in some form or another. The problem is that the currency people most use and sometimes are forced to used are controlled and created from top down authorities(banks & government).

Bitcoin is a complete paradigm shift in currency that will completely disrupt how business is conducted. It is bottom up inherently, with no single point to take over or manipulate, it is a democratic currency of sorts.

Why on earth if it was just an evolution capitalism would they make it inherently deflationary? Deflation encourages savings by allowing to hold on to their money and have it appreciate in value without have to invest in stocks and bonds just to keep their buying power intact. It help prevent boom-bust cycle, and in general discourages people from being a mindless consumers. Spending money on things they don’t need just because if they don’t spend it it will lose value.

If this was some sort of capitalist ploy who ever thought it up must be fucking retarded.

And why would you assume I support the current banking system? After all I am an anarchist I don’t believe in any “friendlier” form of capitalism, nothing but the people should control the means of production not the elite ruling class. Also the abolition of wage labor and a post currency society is required for stateless communism.

The reason why I assume you support the banking system is because it is the only way(other than Bitcoin) to transfer value(money, currency, what have you) to someone else that isn’t physically close to you. Why would you rely on governments & banks when there is an alternative that can’t be fucked with by either one of them even if they wanted to. Unless there is a third way I don’t know about, please fill me in.

Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it can’t exist and I think a lot of the bad rap that capitalism gets is because it uses the state’s monopoly on force as a tool keep competition out.

What do you think about crowdfunding? Is this not an improvement on capitalism? Things will only get built if people actually want them and voluntarily give money to the producer. The people that want the product provide the capital directly to the producer cutting out having to loan from a bank.

“people should control the means of production” Fuck. That. Shit. I love the sentiment that people shouldn’t be exploited as meaty equipment and their hard work should be fairly compensated and have their voices heard by their employers, but just because you work for me doesn’t mean you should automatically be entitled to any part of what I have built. Now if you are helping me build it you can expect to get stake in it but it will be voluntary on my part we shouldn’t need a state to tell us how to be human. Most people have no clue what it takes to build a business how much blood, sweat, and tears, how many 80hrs+ weeks they put in, and how much they risk when giving it a try. The idea that because I pay you to work and you get to go home after 40hrs and forget about it as soon as you leave yet still get chunk of my hard work is infuriating. When I was naive about business I thought it would be great that for people to own the means of production. However after being in and around it for long enough I realize that most employees are just that, employees they want to go home and have a life and forget about work at the end of the day. If it was in their hands we would be out of business or they would just seed control back us the owners because we seem to be the only ones that know what the fuck is going on most the time.

I’m honestly curious though on how you envision the post wage labor, post currency, stateless communism actually working, as in how does it actually function?

I have a feeling your answer will look similar to Bitcoin in some respects. Which is what some consider as the world’s first autonomous corporation. It’s charter would read like: Provide a unit of account that can be transacted globally, electronically, efficiently, quickly, and securely. Its built in block reward and transaction fee essentially pay the wages of the miners who run computers to secure the network. Since the currency’s value is determined solely on demand. So every holder of the currency will essentially get paid by the appreciation in value as demand goes up. So holders of currency will be market it, write new functionality, protect and secure it, anything that will cause people find it more useful and therefore drive up its value. Everyone owns/can own the means of production(or operation of the service) and requires no state since everything is ran from a program that anyone can view the source to. No obviously you could say well Bitcoin is a currency, which it is used as one. What Bitcoins represent, at least to early adopters, are shares that they invested in and to get the most return on their investment they will try to do anything that will help it succeed. I don’t how a communist system would be able to incentivise people to act in a similar manner.

Yeah, technology and “alternative” currency liberates people. Hahaha. What’s next, profit is good too right? Give me a fucking break. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize how stupid it would be to assert something as free market fundamentalist and only available to the first world as “liberatory”.

Technology does liberate people. Take the switchboard for example, the automation of this freed people from having to do such a boring task while also enabling the price of telephony to drop drastically since it no longer had to pay a actual person to be on the job. Technology brought the cost down far enough that more people could afford communicate over long distances than ever before, improving everyone’s life. Technology the tide that lifts all boats. Profit is good it promotes innovation(or in the presence of government enforced monopoly the exact opposite) and making efficient systems(or in the presence of government subsidies usually the opposite).

My understanding of the fundamentals of the free market is something along the lines of voluntary trade between parties who are in agreement free from coercion.

As for being a first world phenomena I assure you that it will do more to enrich the 3rd world than anything else in the next 10 years(except maybe China). The 3rd world doesn’t hardly have any access to the global markets, traditional banking, or stable currency. Bitcoin allows people to send and receive value to and from anywhere, and while it isn’t a stable value right now it is at least unstable in a good way(growing like crazy). Many already use M-pesa which is actually cellphone minutes for their countries cell provider, many people there already regularly except cell minutes for goods and services. They already are testing out a service that can send bitcoin through SMS on dumb phones, which are very prevalent, and soon they will have smart phones in large percentages.

Urberdurr, thank you for taking the time to educate people about the most anti-establishment technology ever created. I have been trying to explain Bitcoin to my local Occupy group, and it’s like trying to explain sex to a virgin.
It seems like people have become so jaded that they immediately assume the worst about anything new that comes along.
Do your research people. There is a lot more to this currency than what is revealed at a glance. At the end of the day, Bitcoin does to banks what file sharing did to the entertainment industry. Blockbuster video just went out of business. Their business model was made obsolete by superior technology. Imagine how we can change the world by doing the same thing to the banks who call themselves “too big to fail.”

Yes and no, He had the escrow funds and hot wallet seized because they had compromised his server. They also got a hold of some other unprotected coins. They don’t actually know how many coins he has in total, its hard to track when you use mixing services I’ve heard that he has anywhere from 11,000-111,000 Bitcoins that they can’t get their hands on. If you encrypt your wallet and secure it properly no one will be able to get their hands on it before the heat death of the universe. Also you can print off your private key(which allows you to control the coins you own) and have it completely offline, I just use a computer air gapped from the network to store mine along with a paper back up. There are also brain wallets which allow you to store your coin only in your head by remembering a phrase of words, however humans are very bad at picking random words so they often get hacked because people use something that has been written down before, movie line, quote, or literature those things are really easy for a program to guess.

I think part of the issue with currency, as with most of the other tools of civilization is the assumption that any of this is going to survive the disruption we are riding on the cusp of. Nature took billions of years of life and managed to sequester enough carbon to make this planet a pleasant place where delicate creatures including humans could evolve. We’ve undone a massive amount of that work in only a couple hundred years. Relocalization of production and subsistence living are going to eventually become the defacto primary drivers of all meaningful trade as the devastation ratchets up year after year. The superstructure of capitalism will eventually become unstable as you can’t sell futures and its attendant derivatives or insurances when catastrophic weather and drought keeps interupting the illusion of business as usual. My thought is that production of food and the maintaining of clean water underpin the basis of human liberation from this monstrosity. That itself could be executed in ways that form a base by which people can explore alternate forms of social interaction not based on capitalist coercion at least internally.

No doubt. We will see more change in the next 20 years than we did in the last 50 years. However I think that currency will always be there in some form or another and no matter how messed up the world is we will always have the internet it’s too valuable to everyone that and the infrastructure is only getting cheaper.

One of the great things about Bitcoin is that it can be patched, updated, forked to change with the times. Although I think currency will not change as much as the rest of the world however the roles that it fills maybe redefined. People will always have the need to transact value, Bitcoin is really good at this. The technology that it is based on also allows for lot of things, not just currency, to be done in a decentralized manner where before they required a centralized trusted third party. If Bitcoin isn’t the most disruptive thing over the next 10 years then the technology behind it and the things it enables it will be.

Wow, so people still don’t understand externalities, though their watching videos about fighting them.

2nd, decentralization does not make it not for profit. IF you have heard of green capitalism or green washing, is it not easy to accept “currency/trade medium washing” in the case of bitcoin?

I think the means of reproducing life should be kept in common and recognizing the state we have in eachothers liberation is fundamental for individual and collective freedom. To think that simply swapping one currency for another which is not aligned/non-attached to banks, is somehow doing good, literally puts one back in the times when there already was such a thing before state centralization of currency.

Instead of trade, can the paradigm not be share?
Instead of currency based exchange can it not revert to need based giving of the generalized reciprocity sort. At one time in human history unconditional giving and not accumulation vast amounts of wealth/stuff individually, was a pre-requisit to life. Is it so scary to think that on a global marble of dirt (which is 70% water) with nearly 8-9 billion humans, that we might have to think outside of the dominant mode of exchange?

Dencentralizing a currency is still believing everyone will run the race equally, or has the chance to make it rich. Even the understanding of from abilities to needs, fails to account for people’s humanity, some people just do not or will not produce, but their existence is still as valuable as any producer, if not more so. I am not your proletariate, I don’t wanna work in your tracker factory as has been said…

We need to basically need to provide everyone with what they need materially and in terms of what they need for self-actualization.
be realistic demand the impossible, no im serious.

“We could be occupying this park. We could say we’ll put up a camp… and not let Enbridge workers come in, that we’d not even let Oka park workers come in. But we haven’t done that. We haven’t done that because we want peace. From your government, from Stephen Harper to Pauline Marois…”

I already replied on this, so I wanna have your reactions. She bluntly says, in other words, that “We” (the Mohawk women, and that bunch of reformist supporters) are NOT for resisting to the pipelines on Mohawk land.

I totally feel like Native women here are the best (only?) strategic pillar for anti-colonial resistance… but if we’d have to wait for a war call from Ellen Gabriel, seems like anarchists have a lotta time to make many many babies before that happens!

Just sayin…

There’s an influent Mikmaq militant women who recently told me something really thought-provoking and inspiring, looking at me straight in the eyes as if directly answering a question I did not dare to ask. That the vision, the strategy, for this struggle is to retake all the land. To liberate it, chop by chop, front after front, blockade after blockade. It’s ambitious, but it sooo totally makes sense, through and through, and above all… it’s POSSIBLE.

…though by NOT concretely resisting? By letting the train pass and the swine have it their way? That’s really suspicious. I stopped believing in Santa Klaus Barbie a while ago. And fairies? Well they’re amazing and all, but I only ever seen one in Brittany, and she was working on a sail boat maintenance.

Oh and direct-to-VHS cheesy films from the ’80s are the Paradise!

Love and rage!

A.
from Antidev

P.S. You realize you just made a product placement for Apple, Stimulator? That was completely unnecessary, especially as Android OS is now beating Apple’s orwellian iOS in popularity… Unless they paid you well for it. :-O

Hey, video is great as always
I followed bitcoins longer time so here is my answer to some comments:

1)Bitcoin website says: Instant peer to peer (user to user) transactions; but if you read deeper, they say: Transactions are broadcast within seconds and verified within 10 to 60 minutes. I can say, I waited many times 20 minutes, transactions are not finished in several seconds. And if we add exchangers who transfer money to your bank account in 3-4 days…
2)Now after they got investor, they stopped to speak untruth that BTC is anonymous currency, now they say Bitcoin is partly anonymous, but potential users should know that MtGox demand verification of identity. So, 80% of users of bitcoins buy and sell BTC through MtGox and they are not anonymous. Other exchangers are similar like MtGox, although you can find people who will give you cash, face to face trade and they don’t ask you for ID. But such exchanger you can’t find in every city on this planet.
3)They say Bitcoin operate with no central authority (even logo image show: decentralized p2p currency), I would say: central authority are developers and MtGox, they possess 80% of BTC market and they make fictive transactions to decide the value of bitcoin, other exchangers just follow MtGox, so, many of them make fictive buying and selling BTC just to change value of BTC, to make profit for themselves. They (MtGox) behave like government which decide about the value of the currency.
4)And if government wants to abolish Bitcoins, they would need just to arrest MtGox, they don’t need to confiscate any “central server”. So, peer 2 peer doesn’t mean anything because Bitcoin has central exchanger MtGox and the whole market depend from MtGox. So, word “decentralized” is just mantra, they speak one thing and they do another thing. If the government abolish MtGox, ordinary user can bankrupt if he has all his savings in the form of Bitcoins.
5)Population don’t care if BTC is opensource or not, only programmers care about it.
6)Salesmen and ordinary people need steady currency and BTC change its value every now and then, for the benefit of developers who possess millions of BTC. People and businessmen hate to change prices of products every day or more times per day, like in some poor African country where is big inflation. When I see people say BTC is steady currency, it is like ideology or hypnosis, they repeat the same mantra and they believe in that. Anybody can see that BTC is not steady than inflationary speculative currency. That’s good for exchangers but not for ordinary people.
7) Most of users of BTC are exchangers who enjoy in speculating in order to gain profit, mass of people don’t have capital to become exchangers and speculate anything, therefore Bitcoin will not be used widely by masses/population than mostly by exchangers.
8)In March 2013 I could read news that two companies invested 500 + 600 thousand dollars in Bitcoin and I understood why it jumped from 17 to 24 and then to 34 and then to 50 euro per Bitcoin. They use this million dollar to make marketing, they pay journalists to publish articles about Bitcoin, the whole March there are many news about BTC.
9)angel investor Shakil Khan invested $500 000 in BitPay which should be like Bitcoin PayPal. Just one website which will serve as PayPal for Bitcoin market.
10)CoinLab invested money in MtGox (Bitcoin Exchanger) and now they go to the court for breach of contract. Mt. Gox and CoinLab, headquartered in Seattle, entered into an agreement in November 2012 regarding bitcoin purchase, sale and exchange services for customers in the US and Canada. Under the agreement, CoinLab was to provide Mt. Gox with financial and investment partnerships in the US. In return, Mt. Gox agreed to have CoinLab handle all of its North American bitcoin transactions. In its complaint, filed Thursday in US District Court in Washington state, CoinLab alleges that Mt. Gox continued to market to customers in North America and did not provide CoinLab with the data and service access it needed to fulfill the terms of the agreement. CoinLab was funded in April 2012 by a group of investors including Tim Draper, Geoff Entress, Barry Silbert, Roger Ver and Joel Yarmon. Established in 2010, Mt. Gox currently handles 66 percent of the bitcoin market’s global exchange volume.
11)bitcoin-24.com is closed by prosecutor and Canadian exchange Virtex got problem with bank. Two-year-old, Calgary-based Virtex was contacted by the Royal Bank of Canada on April 5 and told that its bank accounts would no longer be operating, according to Virtex’s founder, Joseph David. If we can believe to founder, “The problem that the banks have with us isn’t the bitcoin,” David said. “It’s the fact that when you’re accepting money, specifically cash deposits at the bank, you must have a license to operate as a Money Services Business.” David says that MSB licenses are difficult to get. The company had applied for one when it opened its account with the RBC, he said, but it took over a year to acquire.
Beside it, Online bitcoin exchanges have a failure rate of 45 percent, with customer balances often wiped out, a new study has found. “Bitcoin is expressly designed to be completely decentralized with no single points of control,” says Tyler Moore, one of two US computer scientists who worked on the research study. “Yet currency exchanges have become de facto central authorities, and their success or failure drives bitcoin’s success or failure.” Moore and Nicolas Christin looked at 40 bitcoin exchanges, examining the risk bitcoin holders face from exchange failures. Eighteen of the exchanges studied have gone out of business. Nine experienced security breaches from hackers or other criminal activity, forcing five of them to subsequently close. Another 13 closed without any publicly announced breach. Of the 18 exchanges that closed, there were 11 where the authors found evidence of the customers having been reimbursed. Five exchanges have not reimbursed customers while six claim to have done so. The median lifetime of exchanges is just 381 days, Moore and Christin found. The most popular bitcoin exchange, Mt, Gox, has been breached (hacked) multiple times.

I would have liked to seen the interview with Chris Hedges. He has a long history as a war journalist on location and sacrificed his career at the NY Times when he spoke out against Operation Iraq Freedom. Also his books “American Fascists” and “War is a Force That Gives us Meaning” are powerful journalistic critiques against the American global power structure. The guy has even attempted to sue the Obama Admin for abuse of military force.

It seemed like a waste of an interview to bring him on and then edit him to nothing rather than engaging him in a meaningful debate/interview, which makes me wonder if perhaps Hedges has some valid points that made the interviewer uneasy.

Come on! You want me to ruing the gag? LOL My job is to poke fun at people, and Hedges being one of the funniest white dudes ever, well he’s fair game. I did not interview Mr. Black Bloc cancer, but someone else did, I just used what I needed to make my point http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO5LxVUq8fU#t=780